all the love i never gave before i left you
by A. Mulholland
Summary: Because of course she knows. She didn't spend so much of herself loving him to not know that all she had to do to have him was ask.
1. the fall

i. the fall

The book grows with her belly, swelling and tender, full of promise and taking form in ways that somehow feel fated, even if she hadn't known or planned for them. A book and a baby. They're surprises she never expected and burdens she's not always sure she's ready for, but she nurtures them anyway, lovingly, carefully, and with the occasional reprimand, until they're both flourishing and healthy.

She'd never imagined herself as a mother. It was a hazy, eventual step in the grand plan of her life, nestled somewhere between winning a Pulitzer or Peabody and getting married. But as her life turned the corner on 30 with no Pulitzer, no husband, or even a stable full-time salaried job in sight, she'd begun thinking it wouldn't happen.

It hadn't been a tragedy for her.

She was an academic godmother to Davey, if not a religious one, and a surrogate aunt to Lane's twins and Paris and Doyle's kids. She reminded herself of her panic at the sight of Sookie in labor, and told herself she didn't have to put herself through that gut-wrenching experience. She read dozens of articles about how it was becoming more and more accepted that women could be entirely happy and fulfilled in their lives without motherhood — something she'd always known anyway — and continued on with her life.

She hadn't thought she'd be an author either — especially not after the disaster with Naomi Shropshire — never mind an author of an autobiography, having always been an unspeakably private person, happier to find and tell the stories of others than her own. But here she was, writing her entire life. Actually putting pen to paper, sometimes literally but mostly figuratively, to write, admit, and confront the shades and shadows of her life.

This baby and this book, they aren't what she planned for, or expected, or even wanted, but they're what she has now, and she's going to nurture them, cautiously excited to watch them grow.

So she finds a doctor in Hartford and has appointments every few weeks, where they monitor her weight and blood sugar levels, where she sees the tiny human inside of her grow from the size of an olive to the size of a peach and anticipates when it will become a sweet potato, a butternut squash, and a small watermelon.

The book comes to being more quickly, the arcs and curves of the life she's already lived pouring out of her easily, the process at once catharsis and escape. At her most productive, she writes eight thousand words in one day — about her first day of school. The majority will have to be cut or rewritten, but it's a soothing practice.

The rest of it is harder.

She tells her grandmother, who had once imagined this happening, though Emily's dreams had been under simpler, more traditional circumstances, who now looks at Rory with the same love and support she always has, and promises this child will be unconditionally loved and supported too. And she tells Luke, who stops making caffeinated coffee at home and at the diner, who fusses over her and worries and fumes, and who sometimes has a disappointed look on his face, but doesn't give voice to those thoughts for fear of upsetting her.

She knows what he wants to say to her. That even though he's never been Logan's biggest fan, that even though there's some large part of him that would like to kill Logan, there's another part of him that would never forgive her not telling a father about his child.

She knows all of this, and yet still can't bring herself to do it.

To call Logan, to tell him, to say the words would make this all real, and would force upon them — her — decisions she hasn't been able to confront: each other, or not; together, or not. She's not ready face the possibility of not, and clings desperately to hope and the could bes running through her head.

But she has to tell him.

She knows this unequivocally.

She's halfway to calling Logan more than a dozen times before she finally buys the plane ticket in her fourteenth week. She has the three phones laid out in front of her, each of them scrolled to Logan's contact information, as she sits in her grandparents' Hartford home, in the bedroom whose walls once bore posters of *NSYNC and 98 Degrees and which always had sunflowers on the end tables. She's been staring at the phones for the better part of twenty minutes as she tries to decide what to say and which one to use.

The cell reception is robust enough in Hartford to support her other two phones so that she doesn't actually need the Nokia, but she likes having it there anyway. Solid as a rock, it's her tether to her home and the girl she once was. She won't use it for this.

The choice between the other two is harder. It's symbolic, deciding if the call should be considered business or family.

The Huntzberger monolith, she knows, with its obligations, contracts, and dynastic plans, would treat this as business — a check and an unspoken expectation to take care of it, quietly, and that would be the end of if.

But Logan. The Logan she still thinks inexplicably of as hers. She can't bring herself to imagine what he'd do, how he'd react, can't bring herself to imagine another kind of expectation that would appear in his eyes before he could control it, and she can't decide if she would prefer seeing it or not.

Because of course she knows. She didn't spend so much of herself loving him to not know that all she had to do to have him was ask.

It's a power she wishes she didn't have.

After all that she's done and made him do, after the parts of themselves they had to compromise to grasp at and cling to each other, those ties between them shouldn't exist anymore. She shouldn't be allowed to need him anymore.

In the end, she decides she can't have this conversation over the phone. Rory convinces herself, at least a little, that it's a noble decision.

Something this important needs to be discussed in person. She owes him at least that courtesy.

Really, it's because she needs more time.

So she boards a plane in Hartford and lands in London, but doesn't stop by his Mayfair apartment in the first two weeks she's there. Instead, she books herself a room at The Dorchester and takes brisk daily walks through Hyde Park, stops by Harrods to buy Lorelai a teddy bear in a bearskin, and has afternoon tea service at The Savoy with only her laptop for company. She compares the cut fruit from Waitrose to the cut fruit at Sainsbury's and Tesco to while away her time and tries to decide if she could twist the final verdict into something meaningful so that it warrants a few lines in her book. Rory at thirty-two might not be able to, but Rory at sixteen had been able to turn a story about repaving a faculty parking lot into something beautiful and poignant.

She wonders where that girl went and spreads a little more lemon curd on her scone.

Manuscript Rory hasn't yet made it to Yale, let alone met Logan or spent Christmas with him in London, but the city and the lights strung up over Oxford Street bring up the memories unbidden. Rory jumps forward in the story.

In her mind, the days surrounding Christmas 2006 are a hazy dream. Even though everything should've felt more settled than ever — Logan and she were solid, despite the distance and missing him terribly, and her parents were finally giving marriage a go. It seemed that everything had fallen into place and was as it should be, but she'd felt unmoored, adrift, because nothing was quite right.

Because nothing was as she'd expected it to be.

In that year, Lorelai and Christopher had gotten their chance at another life, one that had haunted them, that they gravitated toward and pulled away from for the two decades of her life. But, like two puzzle pieces warped by time and spilled coffee, they hadn't fit — almost, but not quite. Not anymore.

In another life, where Christopher was stronger and where Lorelai loved him more or herself less; in another life, where they hadn't been forced to make the decision at sixteen, and could have grown up separately and more slowly; in the infinite other lives they wondered about, they could've had their own Christmas in London or Paris or Timbuktu. But in this one, Lorelai needed Luke and Chris needed to find his own way.

The parallels haven't been lost on her.

And Rory thinks, just maybe, she and Logan are that other life.

It would be poetic.

It's that thought that solidifies her resolve and finally brings her to touch finger to phone to call Logan.

She's always put her faith in the tidy arcs of a well crafted story.

He picks up quickly, so Rory doesn't even have time to steady herself, or wonder if he's back in Connecticut for the holidays.

"Hello?" he answers, slightly distracted. She can hear typing on the other end and wonders if he hadn't looked at caller ID before picking up and doesn't actually know who it is on the other end. Maybe he'd been expecting a call.

She hasn't heard his voice in two months, and the deep timbre of it makes her want to cry. It might be the hormones.

"Rory?" Logan breathes. At her continued silence, his voice turns insistent. "Rory. Are you okay?"

For him, her response is apropos of nothing, but it's something she's been thinking about a lot lately. "Do you remember right after we first started dating, the dinner at my grandparents' house? Even though we'd only been dating for like two weeks, Grandma kept talking about kids and your family and Cape Cod. It was way too early, but even then I caught myself imagining what it could be like. I've always had an overactive imagination, but when I thought about it, I thought that you could be it."

This is the most honest she's been with him about her feelings in a long time. In the last few years, he's been her first, and sometimes only, sounding board for family drama and professional advice, but she hasn't talked to him — or anyone, not really — about him in a long while. She couldn't.

"Rory, what's going on?" He sounds concerned, which she takes as a good sign. At the very least, he hasn't hung up.

When she finally speaks, the words tumble out of her quickly, either because she's a pressurized hole at the bottom of a deep well or because she's afraid she'll lose her nerve. She can't really tell which one, though that's par for the course these days, not knowing how she's feeling. Her entire body, her entire being, feels foreign to her.

"I'm in London. I'm staying at The Dorchester, which is decorated for Christmas and it's so beautiful. London at Christmas always was my favorite." Her favorite what, she doesn't say, leaving him to guess. She begins to ramble on about that Christmas long ago when they'd walked against falling snow on Old Bond Street, so in love and like something out of a catalog or Christmas movie, before she regroups.

"I have something I need to say to you and I came to London to say it to you, because I told myself it's not really something you say over the phone, but here I am calling you instead of showing my face anyway." Her voice changes quality, taking on a more desperate air. "I know what happens next if I don't tell you. I know what it looks like. But I have no idea what comes next if I do tell you."

"Rory," he pleads. "Please just tell me what you have to say."

"I love you." It's not what she meant to say, but she can't deny that it's true and she's kind of glad it's out there now. It's not her right, but she needs him to know she loves him. She doesn't think she could live knowing he doubted it. She doesn't know when she realized this herself, except that she doesn't think she ever really stopped. Loving him is as much a part of her as the caffeine addiction or relying on a lucky outfit — not quite inevitable or rational, but as indelible a part of her as her blue eyes. She isn't so romantic as to believe in soulmates, except, perhaps, in the cases of her mom and Luke and Kirk and Lulu, but she does think Logan fits. In her conception of who she is, in her ideations of her future, in every path she wants to take, he fits in the spots where she can't get life to lay quite right without him. "That's not what I had to say to you, but it's true. I love you and I should've told you earlier. I should've asked you not to marry Odette. I should've done a million other things differently. And I'm being selfish right now saying all of this. But I don't want to find someone else who fits when you already do. You've always fit."

She hangs up before he can respond or she can say anything else and busies herself with her nightly ritual, pretending the previous twenty minutes were all a nightmare as she brushes her hair and smooths shea butter onto her skin.

He shows up at her door just as she's unmaking the bed and stares at her for a long while after she opens the door. She's almost twenty weeks along now and the bump should definitely be noticeable, especially to him, the person who has spent more time learning the contours of her body than anyone else in the world, but her shirt is loose, so maybe it just looks like her metabolism and steady appetite for Pop Tarts have caught up with her now that she's chasing her mid-thirties.

Wordlessly, she steps aside to let him in.

"Did you mean it?"

"Which part?" she asks, slightly stupid. Then, she shakes her head a little. "It doesn't matter. I meant it all."

"What did you have to say to me in person?" He looks slightly wrecked, but not nearly enough, and though the words stick halfway in his throat, he still looks better than the situation would call for him to. It's really not fair, how good he looks.

"Oh. Um." She considers how to phrase it, but decides if a picture is worth a thousand words, the real thing has to be worth at least a million more, so she takes his hands in hers and rests them on her middle, the bump protruding against their hands. He's always been sharp, so she imagines he knows what that means immediately. She says the words anyway. "I'm pregnant. With a baby. Our baby."

"A baby," he breathes. He looks stunned and a little bit sick, and chokes out a laugh. "I was hoping for a puppy."

She laughs at that, though to her ears it sounds more like a sob.

"I… how?"

She laughs at that, too. Laughing is coming easier by the second.

"The usual way." She shrugs. "You were there."

"You're pregnant," he repeats. It isn't a question, but he doesn't sound angry or upset, either. Mostly, he still sounds awed.

"Yeah. That's what I needed to say to you in person. I'm pregnant. And I love you. I'm pregnant and I love you."

"Is everything okay?" He lifts his eyes finally to meet hers.

She nods vigorously. "Yeah. All normal, all healthy." With a slight smile, she adds, "It's the size of a Coke can right now."

"So it's…" He takes a moment to do the math. They haven't seen each other since their supposed last hurrah in September and it's almost Christmas. It feels like longer. "You're fifteen weeks along?"

"Closer to seventeen, technically. They do this funky math with the date of my last period." She shrugs, by way of further explanation.

He soaks up the information in stride, mind focused elsewhere. "When were you going to tell me?"

"When I saw you next."

"Which was?" He doesn't sound accusatory or indignant, sounds just like the guy he's always been — supportive but never presumptuous of who she should be or what she should be doing, but also not letting her get away with complacency or her own blindness to her prejudices.

"I was working up to it."

"Okay. Okay," he repeats, sounding more sure with the second.

He meets her eyes, and for a moment considers her. Then, lips lifting in a crooked half smile that makes his eyes glitter, he steps toward her. The movement is confident and decisive, but he stops short of touching her.

She gets what he's asking.

In answer, Rory wraps her arms around his middle, and sinks her weight against him, presses her cheek to his shoulder. One of his arms immediately wraps around her back to pull her close while the other tenderly cups the back of her head. He presses his nose to the top of head, breathing her in as he rubs slow circles at the small of her back.

She revels in the warmth and strength of him.

Neither of them moves. As the tears in her eyes soak through his sweater, a combination of relief and joy and exhaustion washes through her, breaking out of her body in shaky, quiet sobs.

He tightens his arms around her, pulling her closer and pressing his lips to her forehead, all the while whispering into her skin the steady drumbeat of his own heart: I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

She tries stifling her yawns as long as she can, so they can stay like this for a little while longer or else talk about everything, but he notices quickly and ushers her to bed, promising that he'll still be there in the morning.

And he is, when she wakes up at 1:00 and again at 3:00, 5:00, and 6:00.

"What do you need?" They've ended up curled into each other over the course of the night, and his voice is soft, muffled by her hair in his face. She didn't know how much she needed him to be here until he was. There's a lot for them to face, beginning and ending with his family and Odette, with her own mixed up in between, but he's here and he doesn't seem to be running. Whatever is coming next, she can't help but feel that a weight has been lifted off her shoulders.

He's here and she doesn't have to be alone.

In the months after she'd first gone to the doctor, and the weeks after she'd landed at Heathrow, and the minutes after she'd hung up the phone, she had cycled through a million ways to tell him. But despite all of that preparation, she hadn't let herself imagine what would come after, hadn't let herself think about how he would react. To imagine him angry or cold, rejecting her and leaving her alone, had terrified her. But he's here, warm and solid behind her, thumb smoothing steady circles on the skin of her stomach and lips pressing warm kisses to the nape of her neck.

"Need?" You, she almost says. A career, a crib, a new wardrobe to accommodate her expanding midsection, and her own place, probably. She unloads none of that on him. Instead: "Um… nothing. I'm staying with mom and Luke in Stars Hollow, when I'm not blowing my trust fund on London's fanciest hotel. I have a doctor in Hartford and appointments every few weeks."

"How often do you go?"

"Once a month for now, but the appointments will get more frequent as I get closer to June 3rd."

"June 3rd," he repeats. Rory can't tell if he remembers the significance of the date, but for her, it had been another strange, slightly surreal connection in her life of parallels. Lorelai has chosen to believe that it's a good sign, the date coming around again to redeem itself.

"When do you leave?"

She admits it sheepishly. "I don't actually have a return flight."

It gives him pause.

Logan sits up a little and turns his head to look at her.

"You were that confident I'd come?" There's a wry smile on his face that could also be a playful smirk, and she thinks he's joking, trying to alleviate some of the tension floating in the air, but can't tell by his tone if he's serious or just teasing her.

Whether it was optimism, realism, or stupidity that caused her to book a one-way flight, Rory can't say, but when she'd bought her plane ticket, she hadn't thought twice about booking just one way. It had never crossed her mind to need a return ticket. And other than a doctor's appointment scheduled for the second week of 2017, there's nothing to truly tie her to the States and everything to keep her in London.

She must look adequately stricken, because his face sets with tender resolve and he takes her hands in his. "Rory," he insists, one of his hands coming to her cheek to tilt her face so that she meets his eyes. "I will always come. I love you."

It's the first time he's said the words to her in a decade, and they coil warmly in her chest, squeezing and wrapping their way up her throat and down to her fingers. After Hamburg, he'd told her he loved her — begged her to know it — in a thousand different ways, but neither of them had given voice to it. She'd pretended not to understand that the kiss at her hairline each time she walked away was I love you and didn't acknowledge that the glimmer in his eye when he looked at her was I love you and ignored that his sighs every time she pulled away were steadily, faithfully, unequivocally I love you.

She knew, as well as she knows the feeling of a keyboard under her fingers or the taste of coffee on her tongue, that Logan wouldn't hesitate. For reasons that are a tangle of love, duty, joy, and decisiveness, he would choose her if she asked him to. Between them, he has always been the more sure-footed, the more confident, the more action-oriented. She knows, and has always known, that if at any point in the last ten years she'd indicated to him she wanted him, he'd have been by her side in a flash. What these intervening years and months and weeks were, then, were for Rory herself to decide that she wanted him, too. For Rory too to unequivocally, irrevocably choose him.

It had taken her longer to get there, but she isn't taking it back now. She doesn't want a future without him in it. By showing up in London, finally admitting that she loves him, she does what she hasn't been able to in the last ten years: she chooses him.

Instead of responding, she kisses him, soft and sweet and then determined and demanding. His lips on hers are sweet and tender and fiery, at once absolution and a promise. She drinks him in and laughs when he collapses them into the pillows. She gets to kiss him for the rest of her life. The thought fills her with joy.

He is slow with her, the first time, tender and sweet and worshipping as he explores the new curves of her. And then he is unbridled, frenetic, and fraught, but always, always, always devoted.

She is undone.


	2. and the fault

ii. and the fault

He'd acted completely on impulse and instinct after hanging up her call, having barely had the presence of mind to grab a coat and his keys before ducking out of his apartment. It had been an entirely visceral reaction, a response to the desperation he'd heard in her voice and felt mirrored back in his own bones, and he was knocking at her hotel door before he'd taken a moment to steady himself.

 _She loved him._

With Rory, it would never be a question that he would come, and when she'd opened the door in a well worn Deerfield lacrosse t-shirt he recognized as his own, her hair loose around her face, and her eyes exhausted, he didn't think he had the strength to walk away again. _She loved him._ He could feel the very soul of him in his lungs.

"What," he'd asked, his breath caught in his throat and his heart in her palms, "did you have to say to me in person?"

And when she'd told him, his hands in hers held against the still gentle swell of her abdomen, her eyes and touch saying more than the words ever could, it was never a question that he would stay.

He'd known, in the second it took her to say the words — " _I'm pregnant. I love you."_ — that this was it, and he'd known, in that same split second, that it was all he needed.

It would be easy now, with her tucked tightly under his arm as they brave the Christmas Eve London crowd on Piccadilly Circus, to think all of this was inevitable. It's easier than it has any right to be, everything falling into place, but it's still not simple, not effortless, not _easy_. He can feel it still in the set of her shoulders, her apprehension and anxiety and caution reflecting his own fears and misgivings, whether he cares to admit to them or not.

There's still so much to figure out, and if they're not careful, not decisive, not convinced, this could all still come tumbling down. But Logan has never been one to walk away from a challenge, and Rory's smiling up at him, the rainbow of the Christmas lights around them reflected in her eyes, her cheeks rosy and glowing, and her lips sweet with peppermint hot chocolate and mini marshmallows when she gives him a quick kiss, just because she can.

They'll make it work.

Because, for Rory, he would go anywhere.

At this moment, though, he's happy they're right where they are.

His parents are in Connecticut for the holiday, Honor and her family are in Tahiti, and Odette is in Médoc with her own, so they're able to spend the next few days — Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Boxing Day — beatific and basking in the glow of being together, ordering takeout chicken tikka masala and garlic naan every night.

He'll break the news to his family after Christmas, but for now, it's just the two — three — of them, bundled in hats and scarves and mittens against the biting London cold to take in the lights and Christmas markets.

They moved her bags from The Dorchester to his apartment in the morning and picked out a new couch along the way, she having finally told him her distaste for the grey monstrosity currently taking up half his living room. He feigns mock hurt when she tells him, feeling the same kind of amusement as he had when she'd danced around Henry, that old, solid, chainlink friend of theirs.

Her gaze lingers, for a second, on the shop windows as they walk past the jewelers sparkling on Old Bond Street, and he catches a flash of wistfulness in her eye. He squeezes her hand slightly, a promise — not tomorrow, but someday soon enough — before pulling her along.

There is a box in the back of his closet containing a ring whose diamonds have haunted him for almost ten years. He doesn't know why he kept it, except perhaps that it reminded him of her and all of the things she believed in him, or else because it cut him every time he remembered its presence, and he needed that, in some twisted exercise in masochism.

When he proposes this time around, it will be with a new ring for a new life, simpler but no less breathtaking.

Logan isn't one to believe in fate, having always walked through life with a bravado that defied any kind of destiny but the one he wanted for himself. But from the first — okay, maybe second — moment, Rory has challenged even the surest motions of his life, pushing and pulling against his instincts and tucking her indelible touch against the tenderest parts of him. Falling in love with her, in the end, had been inevitable.

At twenty-two, he'd been intrigued and charmed by her, had found Rory at once refreshing and addicting. By the time he realized he was in love with her, it was too late — he was already in love with her, a feeling that washed over him with such stunning clarity that all he could or wanted to do was accept it and keep going. So he did. He'd loved her in the ways he knew how: recklessly, and grandly, and sometimes misguidedly, but always wholeheartedly, and had done his best to prove it.

At twenty-four, he'd considered her an anchor in his unsure future, the one thing that moored him to any expectations for himself.

To have her choose not him, then, had been devastating in a way he'd never expected to feel and has never really gotten over. (He's also not sure when he became such a fucking sap, except that that too had everything to do with Rory.)

Years later, in Hamburg, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, she'd been a lifeline thrown to him at a time when he'd been floundering under the guilt after Elias's death, the expectations from his father, the entirely unhelpful suggestions from his mother, and the borderline pitying looks from his sister.

Rory had been, as ever, a touchstone for him. A saving grace, if not a guiding light. Something — someone — comforting, warm, pliant and familiar beneath his fingers. It had been too easy to fall into a rhythm with her, finding each other in one exotic locale or some other tiny corner of the world and finding that intimacy — a safety into which they could escape — in one another, a respite from their own loud realities. It had been even easier to find comfort in their banter and joy in the quirk of her eyebrow and salvation in the depths of her blue eyes.

He followed her lead, agreed to Vegas, and didn't ask questions about Paul, whose name showed up on her phone and slipped from her lips intermittently throughout the weeks and months and, later, years.

He gave what she asked for, nothing more, and ignored everything else.

Logan had spent thirty years of his life being stubborn and rebellious, careless and indifferent to what anyone wanted from him. He'd never given an inch where he didn't want to, except when it came to Rory.

Because the truth of the matter was this: since the moment he'd barreled into her life, all she had ever had to do — all he'd really ever wanted her to do — was ask him to stay.

He's been, infuriatingly and for the most recent decade of his life, a Nora Ephron movie, or, perhaps even more frustratingly, a Nora Roberts novel.

He loved her.

He had known this as clearly as his own two hands and as surely as the heartbeat in his chest, and knew also that he had not stopped in the intervening years since leaving her behind.

For better or worse, Logan Huntzberger would always love Rory Gilmore.

And now, with her hair tangled between his fingers and her back pressed slightly against his chest as they look up at a large Christmas tree in the middle of the city, his other hand resting lightly on the tiny swell of her abdomen, he relaxes into the promise of their future together.

For better or worse, Logan Huntzberger would get to love Rory Gilmore for the rest of their lives.

The thought thrills him, even as the idea of becoming a father terrifies him.

He had never really thought about parenthood, beyond how best to make Mitchum and Shira's second foray into the endeavor as difficult and frustrating as possible, and had never really considered the kind of father he'd be or wanted to be or what a child of his would be like. He'd long known it was expected of him, just another in a long list of dynastic plan to dos he would eventually have to check off, but he hadn't had any strong feelings about it either way. Even when he was planning on asking Rory to marry him years ago, plotting out the arcs of that future life, the thought of children had been vague and hazy in his mind, an eventual step they'd likely take, someday, somewhere down the line, but not something he felt passionately about or could clearly see.

In theory, he likes kids, and in practice, he adores his niece and nephews. He has mildly positive thoughts about teaching a kid how to throw a spiral or write a good lede, but has never imagined himself as a father, and his own relationship with Mitchum leaves an entire universe to be desired.

He doesn't know how to be a father, let alone a good one.

But as unsure as he is about that, he is resolute and positive and sure that he wants this.

A baby.

Their baby, his and Rory's, squalling and cooing and curious, with her eyes and his hair or her hair and his eyes and already so, so precious.

The prospect mostly terrifies him, the sudden onslaught of fear and anxiety and pride and too many other roiling emotions to name bowling him over whenever he stops long enough to think about it.

What surfaces every time is joy. Joy and love in waves he can't even begin to quantify.

He tells her as much as he pulls her more closely to him, wrapping both of his arms around her and tucking her head, fuzzy wool hat and all, under his chin.

"What are you thinking?" she asks, leaning back.

"Just that I love you, Ace."

"Do you?" Her voice is light, joking, and he knows she knows this — he's been telling her every dozen minutes or so to make up for lost time and because he can't contain himself — but he tightens his embrace just a little anyway, just to be safe.

He doesn't know how to be a father, but he has a lifetime of knowledge on how not to be a father, and another lifetime to figure it out.

And this is where he's going to start: "Always."

He takes the first EuroStar to Paris the morning after Boxing Day, meeting Odette, his father, and his erstwhile future parents-in-law at the Hotel Plaza Athénée for an already scheduled post-Christmas brunch that's going to spin in an entirely unexpected direction. He leaves Rory with a chaste kiss to her forehead, a slightly more lingering one to her lips, and an entire pile of parenting books by the front door, courtesy of Amazon UK.

In the evening, after it's all settled, Logan comes back lighter and grinning.

All told, he says to Rory as he pulls her to his side and sinks them into the couch that arrived just after he left, it went better than he expected, though he supposes the Deslauriers didn't want to cause a public scene. There are still issues of contracts the lawyers have to figure out, but nobody put up too much of a fight.

If he's angry or frustrated at the loss of the business deal, Mitchum Huntzberger doesn't show it. He isn't stupid. The media industry — the industry to which he's devoted his entire career, on which his family has made their name — is changing, and he knows his son, with his experience, charisma, and instincts, is the real deal. It's Logan who's going to ensure that the Huntzberger Group withstands the so-called digital revolution and comes out guns blazing. If he were to let Logan leave, the Sulzbergers or the Hearsts or — god forbid — the people responsible for _tronc_ would make Logan the offer he wanted. That's worth a hell of a lot more than any synergies Odette's family can bring.

Logan knew it, too, had known he had the leverage in that room, and told his father as much.

Rory tangles her fingers in his and gives him an exaggerated onceover. There are no bruises or scars on his body, so she can safely assume that neither engagement ring nor hair dryer were thrown in the breakup process. Satisfied, Rory swings her legs over his lap and hands him a bowl of leftover takeout.

But Mitchum, who rarely makes decisions not based on rational business interests, and Odette, who had been about as committed to the relationship as Logan, and the Deslauriers, whose pride won't let them admit anything but the fact that the deal's dissolution was in their best interests anyway, aren't the real obstacle.

The real obstacle is Lorelai, who hops on a plane the minute she hears Rory's plans and drags both Luke and Christopher with her, who shows up at the door ranting about heptagonal money and who needs two pence and twenty pence and two pound coins anyway?

"Hi, mom." Rory's voice is tired when she opens the door, Logan hanging back on the couch, thumb holding his place in a Post-It flagged copy of _What to Expect When You're Expecting_.

"'Hi, mom?'" Lorelai repeats back, unimpressed. "'Hi, mom?!' You cross oceans and continents and seas — at Christmas, no less! — and all you have to say is 'Hi, mom'?"

"Why don't you come in."

Lorelai, Luke, and Chris all file into the apartment, Lorelai exclaiming all the while about being forsaken and abandoned and what the hell is Rory thinking?

Rory had called her mother at some point in the soft hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas to explain where she was, what had happened, and where she intended to stay, having sat bolt upright Christmas morning and proceeded to make Logan walk through the logistics of their relationship before pancakes or peppermint hot chocolate.

Logan had offered to move his job to New York — with the increased digitization of his position as well as his increasingly more strategic role, he could do his job from any HPG office with internet and Polycoms. They could live separately or together (together, she answered decisively; wasn't that the point?) in Connecticut and he would commute into the city every day.

No, she'd disagreed. They'll move back to the States eventually, but she likes the life he has in London — the small cafe around the corner with the fabulous honey lavender latte she's dying to try and his favorite after work pubs, weekend walks through Hampstead Heath or the British Museum, and the potential of becoming best friends with Kate Middleton and Prince Harry. These are the everyday promises she wants to make to him.

She has already thrown a large enough wrench in both of their lives, they might as well keep one part of their lives constant. And anyway, her job, if it can be called that, is even more mobile than his, and he already has an apartment furnished. With Logan on the other side of the couch, his hands splayed soothingly on her shins, she tells all of this to her mother, but receives only stony silence in return — a sign, in hindsight, of the drastic measures Lorelai Gilmore would be taking.

Logan leaves Luke and Chris in front of a _football_ match and walks into the kitchen when the insistent murmur of their voices has quieted, finding various empty Chinese food containers strewn across the the table. Rory and Lorelai sit in tense silence, picking at the remains of their kung pao chicken. He walks toward them gingerly, placing warm hands on Rory's shoulders from behind and dropping a quick kiss to her forehead. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and when she lifts them to meet his, he raises a questioning eyebrow at her by way of asking how she is.

Her slight but genuine smile tells him that, at the very least, no one has disowned the other.

Lorelai's eyes are similarly red-rimmed, and the glower she levels at him is not as forceful as he'd been preparing for. "Take a walk with me, Huntzberger."

Lorelai waits until they've passed Marble Arch before speaking, letting the silence between them strain, rile him up, and set him on edge.

"I don't like it when people hurt my daughter." She says it matter-of-factly, and it's perhaps the biggest understatement he's ever heard. The laugh wells up in him unbidden, but he suppresses it mid-chuckle when Lorelai levels him with an unimpressed look that only Emily Gilmore's daughter could achieve.

"That makes two of us," he responds earnestly, because it's the only thing he can think to say. Logan Huntzberger, who was raised by Mitchum and Shira and learned the art of disappointing at Elias's knee, who in his youth willingly, if drunkenly, fell out of airplanes and jumped off of scaffoldings, is not easily cowed, but Lorelai Victoria Gilmore is a force unto her own, and he's not quite sure how to face her.

"I raised Rory to be independent," she says quietly. "I raised her to be herself, to not need anyone but herself, and to never sacrifice her own ambitions for anything."

"I know."

And he does. He knows full well that Lorelai raised Rory to possess, alongside her caffeine addiction, innate ability to identify movie quotes and song lyrics, and untameable sweet tooth, a striking independence, unfailing strength, prevailing sense of justice, and an unadulterated, if often quiet, joy for life.

He knows these things, he thinks, perhaps better than even Lorelai does. He is, after all, the one who held Rory as she sobbed for disappointing her mother, offered support and jokes and advice as she fought to reconcile the Rory she wanted to be and the one Lorelai was convinced she was with the Rory she was becoming, and stood by her as all the carefully constructed ambitions fell to dust around her and she tried to build something new and just as dazzling. Logan knows first hand the immense and fierce fight within Rory, and recognized its source in Lorelai the first time she pinned him with a glare at that tense Friday Night Dinner. Logan knows the strength and magnetism of these Gilmore girls, of Rory's earnest independence and unapologetic enthusiasm, of her strong opinions and sharp wit, and knows they come from Lorelai.

They're the things he fell for first, the reasons why, in just the first weeks of knowing her, he hadn't been able to get enough. They're the parts of her that had made quick work of his heart more than a decade ago, even if he hadn't known it then. But he loves all of Rory, the parts that revealed themselves more slowly, and that includes the parts of her that aren't so acutely Lorelai. It includes softer, less sure parts, that doubt and make pro/con lists and seek validation, the more cautious parts, and the parts that maybe don't need, but want, him to be there for her.

"I just want to love her."

"It's not that simple."

"I know."

"If loving someone were enough —"

"I know." He is more forceful this time, his tone brusque enough to take her aback. He understands the reasons Lorelai is concerned, and can't fault her for them, his own paternal instincts having flooded him already with a surprising volume of unequivocal pride, protectiveness, and devotion, but Logan still can't help the defensiveness rising in his chest. Because he does know, knows it like the hollow ache in his throat every time he's walked away from Rory in the last ten years.

If loving someone were enough to make a future together work, he would've been by her side, instead of trying to convince himself that their touch and go Vegas relationship was enough and not ripping his heart to shreds by the second.

"Lorelai, I love Rory." He punctuates every word, but there's something strangled about his voice. "I'm pretty sure I've loved her from the moment she called me Judi Dench. I'd move heaven and earth for her. I'd quit my job and become a clown if that's what she asked me to do. But _this_ " — London, him, a new couch, being together, being a family — "is what she wants," — what she finally wants — "and I'm going to do everything in my power to give it to her."

Rory doesn't need him, has never needed him or anyone else to help her pave her way, but she wants him, and that's the crux of it. There's nothing in the world that could stop him being there, even if it means taking the brunt of Lorelai's blame for the rest of their lives.

Lorelai assesses him, gimlet-eyed, and sees something in the set of his shoulders, or hears something in the tone of his voice, or recognizes something in the glint of his eyes that convinces her. "Don't become a clown," she settles on finally. "You don't have the face for a red nose."

"Or the flexibility to fit in a clown car." He cracks a smile and catches the olive branch. "I know you raised her to be independent," he says. "I fell in love with Rory because of her independence and ambitions, not in spite of them, and I would never forgive myself for getting in the way of her achieving what she wants to. I just want to love her, and the baby, and the life we'll create together."

He could say more, could wax poetic for days about the things he loves about Rory and how much she means to him, but those are things he needs to say to Rory, not her mother.

Lorelai arches her eyebrows at him, "She says she loves you and that you're what she wants. I'm — I don't have to like it, I guess, and I'm not going to get in the way of you guys figuring it out, but she's my kid. You're going to know what that means soon enough. I just need to know that I can trust you — that she can trust you." She pins him with yet another look. "If you hurt either of them…"

"You can be second in line to hurt me," he assures her. "After I kick my own ass. It'll hurt more if I'm already down."

Lorelai cracks a smile then, more a smirk than anything, but nods once, decisive.

When they come back to the apartment, they have samosas and sausage rolls in brown paper bags leaking grease, they're laughing about Eurovision and Mini Coopers, and Lorelai has extracted from him a promise to attain Hamilton West End tickets for as soon as it opens.

Rory looks up at both of them with glassy and anxious eyes, looking as though she hasn't dared breathe since they left.

"Oh sweets," Lorelai says as she folds Rory into a tight hug, holding out an arm a second later for Logan to join, pulling the three of them together. "I think he'll do."


	3. in us

iii. in us

They bring Nicholas home to an airy house on a quiet mews in Kensington, where his nursery has stars on the ceiling and shelves already full of books. The moment the front door closes behind them — the three of them — they are suddenly, unequivocally, a family.

As Logan goes about locking doors and putting water on to boil for dinner, Rory lifts a snuffling Nick out of his stroller, cradling him close as she gives him a quiet tour of this home, his new kingdom. They'd stumbled upon, bought, and moved into the house in unexpectedly quick succession just four months before, after falling in love with the bones of the place, just another moment of serendipity in their new life of surprises.

They'd been expecting a daughter, after all, another Gilmore girl to close her mother's book and carry on the legacy. So it's with delight that they laugh when the doctor tells them it's a boy. Leave it to a Gilmore — and a Huntzberger — to defy all expectations from his very first breath. Of course they have a son.

A daughter would have been the perfect epilogue for the memoir Rory is almost done editing, a fairytale ending to that story, but a son is real and warm in her arms, and that's so much better than any neat and tidy ending she could've written.

Life, they've learned, is messy. It throws curveballs and softballs and, just so you never know what to expect next, tomatoes and life vests, too.

So it feels right, that solid, warm weight of their son in his arms and against her chest, as if it was always supposed to be this way, as if it could only ever have been this way. His eyes are blue and curious and full of unconditional trust as he looks up at them, taking in the world for the first time. There is a wisp of blond hair peeking out from under the tiny cap the nurse pulled over his head. It's light enough that Rory thinks it'll stay blond, and Logan's sure his eyes will stay blue. Her mother's eyes. _His_ mother's eyes.

She shows Nick the living room with a brick fireplace and tall windows draped with gauzy curtains where he will learn object permanence, a farmhouse sink in the kitchen where he'll take his first bath, an oaken study with his and hers desks that will become his favorite hiding spot, and, upstairs, room for his family to grow. Logan finds them there, in an empty guest room that will one day play host to tea parties and witness dragon slayings, and wraps them both in his arms, guiding them across the hardwood floor in a silent, swaying dance.

 _I count ten fingers and ten toes and then go back to count them again, smooth a finger across his brow and cheeks, and breathe in his powder sweet scent._

 _In those first moments, it's already different than I expected, being a mother._

 _It's more exhausting than I could ever have imagined, and every part of me, from my fingertips to my shins to the very core of me, aches with the lack of sleep I'll never catch up on again. But I ache, too, with an unending pride and indescribable love._

 _It overwhelms me. It astounds me. It is all I ever wanted._

 _He's not what I expected from my life. Nor is his father, who in those first moments is sitting in quiet reverence, with a look on his face I can only describe as awe, at the foot my hospital bed as he watches us. The love I feel for this tiny human against my chest is rivaled only by the love I feel for the man who helped me create him. The smile we share is small and tired, but like this child and this life, it is ours._

 _Neither of them is what I expected, but they're who I found and fought for and I am so, so glad for them._

 _We name him Nicholas Alexander._

 _It's a name that, despite cousins and extended family members whose provenances are the Mayflower and who have that ancient preference for staid and stately names, holds no strong tethers to either of our families and bears no legacies or ambitions but the ones he'll create for himself._

 _His — my — our — life is just beginning. There is so much more story left to tell, left to live, and I can't wait to see where it takes us._

 _We're no longer just the Gilmore girls, but we still talk a mile a minute, eat our weight in Red Vines and Mallomars, and consume pop culture and coffee by the gallon. Against all odds, in all the shades and forms and unexpected turns that it can take, we are still, as ever, and as always, a family._

Days take shape slowly, hazily, and dreamlike, until one day they look around and the routine they've settled into is a life together. There are bleary-eyed feedings in the middle of the night and banana pancakes (perfect, if Logan is cooking, and slightly charred if it's Rory) in the morning, tummy time on lazy Sunday afternoons and slow good morning kisses as Logan heads out the door the next morning.

They agree early on that marriage can wait, and it does, falling to the wayside of visa applications, European mergers and acquisitions, meetings with editors, nursery school decisions, and other regular mundanities of life. For the first few years, Rory half expects Logan to propose at every major milestone and holiday, but a ring doesn't appear and they're still a family, growing in love and in number.

They have Beatrice three years after Nick, planned this time, and Eleanor two years after that, less planned but still a welcome joy.

Their little family is chaos in its finest form, messy and muddy, loud and inexplicably covered in jam, somehow always late for something, despite Rory's meticulous planning, but occasionally content and quiet. And surprising. Always, always a surprise.

Nell, on the eve of her terrible twos, is asleep on her father's chest, his hand rubbing protective circles across her back. Bea, with legs hanging off the edge of the couch and her head in her mother's lap, breathes deeply with sleep. And Nick is curled between his parents, valiantly but futilely fighting against the weight of heavy eyelids.

The final strains of the credits to Home Alone are playing softly from the TV and Rory relaxes into the feeling of the room. Under the twinkling of the white lights around their Douglas fir, everything is pine-scented warmth.

"Hey, Logan," she whispers.

"Hmm?" His eyes are closed.

"Let's get married."

It really had been a conscious decision not to get married. Neither of them was sentimental enough to want a wedding and they'd deliberately chosen hyphenated last names for the kids so they wouldn't run into too many questions at passport control. They hadn't needed or wanted paperwork or rings to prove their commitment to each other. And in the midst of brand new mother- and fatherhood, Rory had been finalizing details for the first printing of _Gilmore Girls_ while Logan was dealing with the intricate consequences of British politics on his European business. They hadn't had the time or wherewithal. Later on, a month would bleed into a year into two and then into school pickups, book tours, the births of daughters, business trips, and youth football matches, to the point where it just didn't make sense for them anymore.

Years later, when she wonders why she chose this moment, she won't have a good explanation, except that maybe she wanted to capture the warmth filling her chest and keep it safe.

Logan's response is mumbled, tired from an eighteen-hour trip to Frankfurt and back again so that he could make it back in time for Baa's preschool's Christmas pageant, and she's not sure he'll remember in the morning. "Okay."

Slowly, long after the credits have ended, they rise, tucking the kids in with kisses on cheeks, foreheads, eyelids, and noses before climbing into their own bed and falling asleep tucked against each other.

In the morning, there's the smell of coffee and slightly burnt bread in the air and, on the bedside table next to her phone, a dark blue velvet box.

Still sleep weary, she doesn't quite recognize the implication of the object, so when she reaches for it and cracks it open, its contents surprise her more than they should. A diamond ring winks back at her — solitaire, low profile, set in thin platinum; simple and exactly what she wanted.

"I was going to propose tomorrow." Logan's voice comes from the door, where he's leaning against the jamb with a soft, affectionate smile on his face. Tomorrow, would be eight years to the day that he'd shown up at another door of hers, when they'd started this entire journey. Never let it be said that Logan Huntzberger didn't like a bit of symbolism too. "But you beat me to it."

He comes to kneel at her side. "I don't have any grand gestures for you this time, Ace. What I do have is my entire life. Because that's what you've given me. This crazy life we're building together, those hooligans we're raising — I'm in awe of it every day, and I love you more than I ever thought I could love anyone. You have made me the happiest and luckiest man in the world. Will you marry me?"

Before he can finish asking the question, she's kissing him, soft and hungry, placing a hand on either of his cheeks to tug him closer to her. "Yes," she bites against his lips. "Of course." She's grinning through tears as she pulls back enough to let him take her left hand and kisses him again once he slides the ring onto her finger. "But, for the record, I asked you."

The kids are thoroughly unimpressed by the news, though Nell happily flings some apple sauce in reaction. Bea rolls her eyes and huffs "Finally" in a tone that she shouldn't be able to manage for at least another ten years, and which she undoubtedly learned from Grandma Lorelai, who has the exact same reaction when she's told.

Shira, for her part, has been making plans for a white tie event at the Boston Public Library for seven years and jumps into action before any of them can stop her.

Any misgivings on either side had slowly ebbed after Nick's birth, first to grudging respect and, by the time that Nell was born, had grown into something akin to affection. Their relationship with Mitchum and Shira would never be what it was with Lorelai, but it was comfortable now, and content.

In the end, they get married overlooking the ocean in the backyard of Emily's Nantucket home, where Finn holds court with Miss Patty and Babette, Colin ribs Taylor about austerity policies, Lorelai and Shira stand in solidarity to tell their grandson that no, he absolutely may not go whale riding, and Andrew corners Mitchum and Jess at once for their thoughts about the state of publishing.

Rory wears a white sundress, holding a bouquet of blue hydrangeas from her grandmother's front yard in one hand and Logan's heart in the other.

Lorelai walks her daughter down the aisle, but doesn't give her away, because this eclectic group of people they love and who love them in return are their family, and it's not sacrifice or loss when family grows.

They stand under a canopy of white flowers and vow what they prove to each other every day: to be the other's sharpest editor, most discerning reader, and fiercest defender; that decaf coffee will forever be verboten in their kitchen and to eat vegetables at least once a day; that they will offer unconditional support for the rest of their lives; and, simply and at the heart of it, that they love each other.

It's a moment two decades in the making when, finally and to the swell of a string quartet, Logan lifts Rory in their first kiss as husband and wife.

Finn whoops, Emily beams, and they are married.

Tomorrow, they will be off to Bangkok, and after that the An Thoi islands, Xi'An, Tokyo, and all the other corners of Asia they've been meaning to explore for almost twenty years, while their children with mouthfuls of Received Pronunciation will spend the most American of summers on Nantucket. In two months, they will close their London house to move back to Connecticut, where Logan will make a daily commute to New York City as the newly minted Chief Strategy Officer of Huntzberger Publishing Group. Rory will continue to write feature pieces for The New Yorker and continue her regular correspondence with Reese Witherspoon, who read, loved, and optioned a charming, pithy, and self-deprecating story about growing up in an unbelievable town — hailed by critics as a clear-headed and honest examination of mothers, mistakes, and legacies — and turned it into a TV series, now in its third season.

It's a crazy life that they've created together, but tonight, it's also simple. Under a wash of bright stars, the peals of their children's laughter rising above the raucous din of the reception, they hold tight to each other, in love, in loss, and in the living.

 _A/N: A note on names, in case anyone is as interested in minutiae and symbolism as me: the girls are Beatrice Clio and Eleanor Frances. Beatrice, she who brings happiness, for Trix, the first Lorelai. Clio is the muse of history and heroic poetry. Eleanor is a name that has no meaning, which feels right somehow, to allow a girl to find her own. And St. Francis de Sales is the patron saint of writers and journalists._


End file.
